Saturday, February 28, 2015

Short fiction reviews! Favorites from winter 2015

I’ve been wanting to start posting regularly about short
fiction. I’m way behind in my reading (what else is new?), but since Christmas
I’ve still found pieces that thrilled me, surprised me, made me fall in love.
Most of the stories I list here were published in January, and some even
earlier… but as I said, I get behind. And I’ve been thinking of a tweet I saw: that
if you love a writer’s work, one of the best things you can do is share your
love of it in a review. Sometimes I read a story that blows me away, but it
seems to get no attention in the SFF community-- not a single tweet or review
or mention. So consider this my mentions.

Family and Love

Writer Ken Liu, among others,
has spoken of how fantasy literature can act to “literalize metaphors.” Kishore’s story is a perfect example of this:
the barriers of communication between mothers and daughters become, in her
story, a physical barrier of engulfing silence, swallowing not just words but
all sound. The metaphor is deftly realized, truly eerie. And the interactions
between the three women in this story—a grandmother, a mother, and a
daughter—are sharp-edged and complicated. There is pain between these women, a
family legacy of anger. And love unspoken. Kishore’s writing is painful and
evocative, and she does not settle for easy resolutions. I loved this story,
and I wish it would get the attention it deserves.

And
ohhhhh, this one blew me away. Boy meets boy cute in a haunted house. Except
that one of the boys is more than he appears. . . This is funny and sweet and
sad and poignant. The voice of the narrator makes
the piece. Stufflebeam just seems to nail it: the casual snark of a teenage
boy, a voice infused with lightness and humor and adolescent confusion and
emotional self-defensiveness. The narrator is discovering romantic love for the
first time, and discovering that that love comes in the form of love for
another boy. There’s a crazy alien scenario, and a poignant scene where he
tries to come out about his gay relationship to unsympathetic parents. The end
is wistful, and it’s not clear how our pair of lovers will fare… but that’s the
point of growing up, the story seems to suggest. At the end, the narrator
thinks “…how it’s never
like you think it’ll be, this life stuff, which is something new I’m learning
all the time.”

Terraform
is a new venture publishing short science fiction (2000 words and under) with a
focus on near-future sci-fi "honing in on the tech, science, and future culture topics driving the zeitgeist." “

I have really liked a lot of what I’ve seen on this site.
The tight focus reminds me of science fiction’s singular superpower: that it
can address contemporary social issues in a way that no other genre can. My
favorite pieces so far do exactly that.

Inspired
by the author’s trip to the markets and factories of Yiwu, China. It’s the year
2024, and an Internet-connected Santa Claus toy is coming off the conveyor belt
in a Chinese factory. This short piece traces the journey of that toy from China
to the shelves of a Target store in New York City to its eventual fate 83 years
later. Global supply chains, global competition, the enduring life of plastic
junk… This was just fascinating.

And
this was awesome. The Uber-ization of the world. There are three distinct
narrative voices in this very short story, yet it all works: an asshole calling Uber for a delivery of cat food to his home; the voice of Uber itself, now
a vast artificial intelligence overseeing all Uber deliveries, car rides and jobs;
and the voice of an Uber worker trying to deliver that damn bag of cat food through a flooded New York City.
This piece is scary-sharp. That poor Uber worker, who thinks he/she is actually
going to make it, that they’re a freaking entrepreneur
going places within the structure of the Uber corporation, that they will
someday make it to Mars. Is this where the world is going? Or are we already there?

Dark Stories
with Indelible Imagery

Another
love story between teenage boys. But far, far darker than Stufflebeam’s story
above. It’s the remarkable imagery that makes this piece—the swirl of crow
feathers, a ghost’s revenge, the nightmare that grips a group of teenagers in
the wake of disaster. Love suppressed and turned to something dreadful.

This
story appeared in the fall of last year, but I only stumbled upon it last week.
Beautiful mermaid/selkie/sea maiden creatures just waiting to be tamed by human
men? Um, right. This is a dark take on that old myth. Menace pulses from the first line. This is creepy,
creepy, horrific and tantalizing and gorgeously written.